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Comment by jbeda | Hacker News Reader

I'm the tech lead for GCE. I'm sorry to hear that App Engine didn't work out for the poster. Perhaps someone from that team may have some suggestions. In addition, I'm happy that he was able to stay with the Google Cloud Platform.

With that being said, I'd really like to encourage the OP to store his data base (and boot his instance) from persistent disk. Running any database on scratch disk (without replication) is probably not a good idea. Even with hourly backups (make sure you are testing restores!) you still stand to have up to an hour of data loss and the pain of doing the restore if your instance should fail.

In addition, when using PD for all block storage you can start with a smaller instance. If you need more horsepower you can terminate that instance and boot from a larger instance with a minimal amount of downtime.

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Can you give your colleagues on the App Engine team the number of the Dell sales rep you buy your servers from, because a quick comparison of App Engine vs. Compute Engine prices shows that App Engine is at best 10x more expensive per unit of RAM:

  | Instance Type              | MB-mem | $/hour | $/month | $/hour/GB |
  |----------------------------+--------+--------+---------+-----------|
  | GAE F1/B1                  |    128 |  0.080 |   57.60 |      0.64 |
  | GAE F1/B1       (reserved) |    128 |  0.050 |   36.00 |      0.40 |
  | GAE F2/B2                  |    256 |  0.160 |  115.20 |      0.64 |
  | GAE F2/B2       (reserved) |    256 |  0.100 |   72.00 |      0.40 |
  | GAE F4/B4                  |    512 |  0.320 |  230.40 |      0.64 |
  | GAE F4/B4       (reserved) |    512 |  0.200 |  144.00 |      0.40 |
  | GAE F4_1G/B4_1G            |   1024 |  0.480 |  345.60 |      0.48 |
  | GAE F4_1G/B4_1G (reserved) |   1024 |  0.300 |  216.00 |      0.30 |
  | GAE B8                     |   1024 |  0.640 |  460.80 |      0.64 |
  | GAE B8          (reserved) |   1024 |  0.400 |  288.00 |      0.40 |
  |----------------------------+--------+--------+---------+-----------|
  | GCE f1-micro               |    629 |  0.019 |   13.68 |      0.03 |
  | GCE g1-small               |   1783 |  0.054 |   38.88 |      0.03 |
  | GCE n1-standard-1          |   3932 |  0.115 |   82.80 |      0.03 |
  | GCE n1-standard-2          |   7864 |  0.253 |  182.16 |      0.03 |
  #+TBLFM: @I$5..@>$5=($3/$2)*1024; %.2f::@I$4..@>$4=$3*24*30; %.2f

No matter how good or bad the OP's GAE code was, that's a heck of a handicap to overcome.

That's the famous App Engine Golden RAM.

I was hoping that eventually App Engine would be implemented on top of GCE, with all the services App Engine now provides available for GCE, and move to container‐based sandbox, like OpenShift/Heroku/Elastic Beanstalk, instead of application‐based sandbox. Especially now that App Engine has switched to instance‐based pricing.

For example there’s this old thing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDRKNzd... (Google App Engine VM Runtime TT Sign‐up)[1]

Unfortunately, since all of this effort went into securing yet another runtime (PHP), I don’t think it will happen.

It would be great if at least it was possible to use Appscale over GCE or just the Datastore – which is by far the most attractive feature of App Engine, other than Task Queue – with custom deployment solution.

Google Cloud Datastore could deliver just that if you don’t mind paying twice:

    You should be aware that Cloud Datastore has a serving component 
    that runs on Google App Engine, so there will be instance hour costs.

[1] “If you are interested in using VMs with your App Engine applications in the future, let us know by signing up here.” http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-compute-e...

I imagine Compute Engine prices will go up in the same way App Engine prices did.

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